“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... some years I had been impressed with the fact that many people I admired then – Martin Luther King, Reinhold Neibuhr, the Kennedys, Isaiah Berlin and Wilson himself – were also dedicated Zionists, totally opposed to anything like a Palestinian side. Wilson himself was a philo-semite, and particularly enthusiastic about scholar-warriors like Yigal ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... his foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”

“... aristocratic vanity and waste, a provocative topic in the year following the execution of the King and Queen of France. ‘Knight was never generous in his polemics,’ says Penny, in the introductory Brief Life which is invariably too brief on such matters, ‘and this, combined with his apparent admiration for disordered nature, led some to react ...”

“... because of their substantial remittances by no means uninfluential characters. They were loyal to king and country, and pined to be like father. Thus they damped down tendencies towards independence, encouraged complacency (and contributed to an officer cadre that would willingly follow orders at places singled out for the slaughter of colonials such as ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... often repeated tic: Yakimov’s wearyingly reiterated obsession with food and drink; the diplomat David Boyd’s snigger-cum-snuffle. The high-budget TV version brought the best out of the books. Alan Plater’s adroit screenplay, though it runs for six hours, removed almost all repetitions and longueurs. More, it gave interpretative shape to what, though not ...”

“... of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most successful political party in modern European history.Sometimes it has been a force of reaction, in the spirit of Lord Salisbury, a ...”

“... its publication out of his own pocket, and who prepared a précis for personal presentation to the King – one of the earliest scientific soundbites. ‘But for him, in all human probability’, wrote Augustus de Morgan in the mid-19th century, the Principia ‘would not have been thought of, nor when thought of written, nor when written printed’. Halley ...”

“... for displays of cultural superiority. Campaigning against decadent Asiatics in Turkey, the Spartan king got his prisoners of war to remove their luxurious clothes, revealing underneath the pale, abundant flesh that luxury had produced. He then put them on exhibition to show his soldiers both how much wealth was available and how little their effeminate victims ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... round and supporting Grey. A few weeks later Lloyd George shocked both A.J. Balfour and the King by suggesting that, as ‘Germany meant war,’ it might ‘be better to have it at once’. In explanation of his volte-face Professor Gilbert writes that for Lloyd George: international understanding was preferable to war ... Yet the principles of ...”

“... still a strong psychological barrier against its conversion into political opposition. The ‘good king, bad advisers’ idea retained a surprising currency. This view is broadly confirmed by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, who, in The Cuban Revolution, concludes that the Cuban Government retained an undetermined level of popular support. For many citizens, breaking ...”